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President Yoon Suk-yeol of South Korea (left) speaks during a summit with President Joe Biden of the US and Prime Minister Fumio Kishida of Japan in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Nov. 13. (Yoon Woon-sik/The Hankyoreh)

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, US President Joe Biden, and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida ratcheted up pressure on North Korea to a fever pitch in a rare sequence of bilateral and trilateral summits in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, on Sunday.

The three leaders adopted a joint statement in which they agreed, among other things, to step up trilateral security cooperation in the face of the North Korean nuclear weapon and missile threats.

The new Korean Indo-Pacific strategy Yoon announced last Friday made it clear that the current administration would be siding with the US in the power battle between Washington and Beijing. This has raised concerns that the “neo Cold War” system in East Asia — pitting South Korea, the US and Japan on one side against North Korea, China and Russia on the other — will only become further entrenched.

In the “Phnom Penh Statement on Trilateral Partnership for the Indo-Pacific” released Monday, the three leaders said the US would be reinforcing its extended deterrence to South Korea and Japan, while the three sides would be sharing North Korean missile warning data in real time and launching a trilateral dialogue for economic security. They also announced plans to increase trilateral cooperation in a broad range of areas including maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, supporting Ukraine, and strengthening advanced technology supply chains.

This marks the first time the three sides have adopted a joint statement with such comprehensive terms, and a closer look at the content shows the focus is clearly set not only on North Korean provocations but also checks on China.

Ahead of the first in-person summit Monday between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping, White House national security advisor Jake Sullivan said last weekend that the US planned to beef up its presence in East Asia if North Korea’s provocations continue. This has been read as signaling that Washington intends to apply strong pressure on Beijing to play a part in checking the advancement of North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile capabilities.

Certainly, the improvement of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles necessitates stronger deterrence. Recent actions by Pyongyang — including large-scale tactical nuclear weapon unit exercises and the launching of 35 missiles in response to joint military exercises by South Korea and the US — clearly show that it has adopted a different strategy from before. The situation is one where the need for trilateral security cooperation by South Korea, the US and Japan has become irrefutable.

At times like this, it is even more essential that South Korea adheres to its own principles and strategic considerations.

We should be working carefully to develop plans for keeping our relationship with China on a stable footing. There also need to be rational discussions in South Korean society about how far our military cooperation with Japan should extend.

In a summit lasting 45 minutes on Sunday, Yoon and Kishida denounced North Korea’s ballistic missile test launches as a “grave provocation,” stressing the importance of trilateral security cooperation with the US. But in terms of resolving the issue of compensating victims of forced labor mobilization, they went no further than generic remarks about “continuing discussions toward a swift resolution of outstanding issues between our two sides.”

We hope both leaders bear in mind that the public will not offer its support to trilateral security cooperation so long as Japan refuses to show a forward-thinking attitude on the resolution of historically rooted issues and retaliatory economic measures.

The press pool was denied coverage of the South Korea-US and South Korea-Japan summits Sunday, based on agreements among the three countries in question.

Coming on the heels of the presidential office’s refusal to grant reporters with the MBC network seats on the presidential aircraft just before Yoon’s departure, these restrictions on the media’s coverage of summits that stand to have an enormous impact on the Korean Peninsula must be regarded as a serious issue.

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